be a good listener

Listening intently will help you to improve your memory. The first mandate for this would be to get a deep, vivid and lasting impression of the matter which you wish to retain. To do this, you must certainly concentrate on the subject. In fact, five minutes of intense concentration will produce greater results than many days of reading with a mental haze. Repetition is the second natural law of remembering. You can memorize an almost endless amount of material if you could repeat it often enough. Go over the knowledge you want to remember and then apply it or use it. But the mere blind mechanical going over a matter is not enough. Intelligent repetition of what you learn and hear will positively help you to improve your memory. The third law is association. This is the indispensable element in recalling. In fact it is the explanation of memory itself. The secret of good memory is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact you care to retain. In this information age, aided by telephone, radio and TV, most of us spend our waking hours listening to the spoken word. We spend our maximum time in verbal communication by way of talking and listening. Yet most of us do not know how to listen. The average person is a 'half-listener'. He retains only 50% of what he hears, if he has heard it right. Listening is a mental skill, which can be developed through training and practice. Just as the act of reading requires, that you do more than just look at the print, similarly, the act of listening also requires, that you do more than simply let the sound waves enter your ears. Good listening demands active participation. But the basic problem is that we always think much faster than we hear. If we are poor listeners, we soon become impatient. Our thoughts start wandering and then dart back to the speaker. By this time the speaker is far ahead of our understanding or comprehension. Now it is harder to follow him. So our thoughts flitter away. Finally we give up, even though we are listening, and the person is still talking. A good listener uses his thinking power to his advantage. While listening to the speech, he inwardly analysis what he hears. Is the speaker giving accurate facts? Do they come from an unbiased source? Is he giving a full picture or a distorted version so that he could prove his point, and so on. All the studies in listening comprehension, point to the importance of the individual's interest in the subject. Bad listeners seldom give the speaker or his subject any merit. They declare the speech as 'dry' after listening to a few sentences. On the other hand, good listeners try to find something useful in what is being said. You can develop your listening skills, by learning to focus your attention on the central idea of what is being said. Do not waste your time in trying to remember each and every point. Always concentrate on the theme, and this will help you to remember the facts better. One of the basic reasons, for paying close attention to what is being said, comes out of the courtesy or respect for the individual. Intelligent listening helps the speaker to express what he has in mind, which may be useful for you. Please remember that how you listen, has a direct bearing on what you learn. When you have mastered the skill of listening, you will get an edge over others in public speaking. The fact that you have learned how to heed to the spoken words will mean that you have automatically become a more interesting speaker yourself. Just as you will get more fun and reward from listening, so others will get more out of what you have to say.